CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: Exploring ‘Degrowth’

Protests erupted around the world in the 1960s and 1970s to highlight international civil rights, anti-war, feminist, gay liberation and student concerns along with a range of environmental and anti-consumerist issues. Protesters yelled ‘NO!’ – no to sending young soldiers to Vietnam, no to nuclear weapons, no to lower wages for women, no to laws against homosexuality, no to developments destroying pristine nature, no to chemical pollution of air and waters, no to universities closed to the disadvantaged. Unemployment rose as young people rejected work in dangerous and anti-social industries and institutions. An ‘underground’, anti-systemic movement attracted them either to the countryside – to establish alternative forms of self-provisioning – or to squat in the cities.

Simultaneously a culture of revolt became rife. Urban streets were riddled with graffiti and posters. Theatres were enlivened with spectacular, seditious and unconventional performances flouting post-war norms. Bookshops and cinemas became sources of ‘banned’ materials until censorship weakened and gave in. Journalism and writing evolved novel forms of creative non-fiction, discontinuous narrative and performance poetry. The young stepped out in direct actions hailing new forms of citizenship and relationships. Non-hierarchical organising and networking evolved new politicking that endured and morphed with new media technologies.

As all kinds of movements proliferated, changes in laws, policies and everyday culture ensued. Consequently, progress was made on many socio-political and cultural fronts, yet the world’s ecological challenges and social inequities have deepened and expanded. Climate change is just the tip of the environmental-crises iceberg. The first couple of decades of the twentieth century have brought severe biodiversity loss and planetary apocalypse to everyone’s lips. These existential challenges have been met by competing solutions such as green and circular economies, ecosocialism, other sustainability ‘fixes’ and universal sustainable development goals.

It is in this context of heightened debate and widespread dismay that the degrowth movement sprang to life in Europe and spread further afield. The term ‘décroissance’, later translated into ‘degrowth’ in English, began as a provocative slogan used by activists in the early 2000s. The French political scientist and editor Paul Ariès has referred to degrowth as a ‘missile word’, intentionally making people question the ‘growth is good and more growth better’ flag under which all nations seemed to have united in economic terms.¹

In strict translations of ‘décroissance’, going beyond growth means reducing or decreasing. Proponents focus on reducing environmental use and abuse, yet degrowth is, at once, both a qualitative and a quantitative concept. The qualitative dimension is captured in concepts such as ‘frugal abundance’, which connects ‘conviviality’ – enjoying one another’s company and acting in solidarity – with valuing the richness of simplicity as in ‘small is beautiful’.² Beyond significant misunderstandings arising externally, degrowth has developed multiple meanings and nuances within the activist movement campaigning for it.

Most significantly, the word ‘degrowth’ has misled to the extent that its prefix and association with words such as decline and diminish seem to indicate that degrowth means austerity, puritanism and even poverty. The minimalist simple-living aspect of degrowth seems to confirm such suspicions. Especially since the global financial crisis broke during 2007–8, with persisting consequences, degrowth sounds unsettling. In contrast, degrowth theorists and activists see degrowth as establishing secure and safe lives, fulfilling everyone’s needs in collaborative and collective ways, as celebratory and convivial.

The degrowth principle of living within Earth’s regenerative limits in socially equitable and collectively supportive ways addresses both global and environmental crises. This book is intended as an introduction to degrowth for anyone unfamiliar with the movement. Equally, it is written for those who are familiar with degrowth but would like a handy résumé on what the movement stands for, what it has achieved and where it might go in the 2020s. It will explain the intended meanings of degrowth for its protagonists and advocates, who have realised certain degrowth ideas and principles in mini-experiments with collective living, working collaboratively and self-governing using consensual decision-making. Chapters focus on various aspects of degrowth in action. Activists are mobilised by theories and visions, and propose policies for immediate implementation as well as establishing degrowth in stages and holistically, that is, a degrowth project.

CHALLENGING GROWTH

Challenging economic growth as a concept or ideal is neither novel nor extraordinary. However, recent critics of growth, such as the late democratic socialist Erik Olin Wright, tend to counsel market-based reforms rather than a revolutionary response aimed at minimising ‘stuff’ produced. Many critics of growth adopt a preference for the term ‘development’. Consequently, development has become ‘a word for all seasons’, meaning whatever growth critics want it to mean in the circumstances, with different types of emphases on qualitatively improving the conditions of living for the majority who currently live more precariously and powerlessly than the elite few with wealth and political influence.

A reformist Western concept and practice, the whole idea of development has been rebutted in ways aligned with degrowth thinking, focusing on decolonisation and liberating imaginaries, since the 1980s in a radical ‘post-development’ critique.³ Meanwhile, capitalism has grown extensively and intensively, invading new territories, new sectors and creating its very own context for growth in patents and copyrights for novel technologies, in short an information ‘territory’ within which to expand assets. So it is clear that calls for keeping capitalism on the more qualitative tracks of development consistently failed.

The nineteenth-century revolutionary Karl Marx’s Capital (vol. I, 1887 [German, 1867]) has been the outstanding reference for theorists pondering the anomalies of a politico-economic system forever spiralling upwards in monetary terms, imperially expansive in its impulses and aimed at making profits for the few. Yet those who established communist regimes in the twentieth century, ostensibly to change the world according to Marx – who would have been horrified at the results – just seemed to produce another version of inequity and, significantly, economies based on productivist notions of growth.

Since the global financial crisis the most humane journalists and left-minded politicians have tended to focus on managing growth following development principles of more just distribution, at least in the ‘good times’. Still, when economies turn bad, the state has been just as likely to resort to seemingly necessary austerity. In stark contrast, on the streets, in underground cultures and oppositional media, anti-capitalist demands to occupy (potentially everything) and calls for ‘system change not climate change’ have become rampant. In this context, it is no surprise that an explicitly anti-growth, indeed de-growth, movement would gain attraction.

In terms of the flagrant abuse of planet Earth, we know that capitalist production and trade has increasingly outstripped its regenerative capacity for the last 50 years. By 2019 this meant exploiting natural resources as if there were 1.7 Earths.⁴ Much over-consumption has occurred in the Global North – where the degrowth movement started and maintains its greatest support – in Europe. Environmental crises are inextricably linked to economies harnessed to growth. Initial responses to degrowth and debates around the concept tend to confirm the extent to which our minds, our imaginaries (not simply our everyday practices) have been colonised by the idea of growth. It is as if economies without growth are impossible to imagine. Even to mention degrowth in mainstream everyday situations seems idiotic and illogical, at least until one learns its nuances, foundations and intents.

By way of one significant example, unions are structurally oriented to increasing the size of the capitalist pie, not only their slice of it. Mainstream workers and unionists most strongly identify as a class apart and opposed to capitalists and managers with their primary goal as a fairer distribution of output. Even if unions have gone on strike in environmental protests, the holistic idea of degrowth challenges their everyday struggles to maintain full employment and to gain higher wages and salaries. Indeed, the degrowth movement evolved to expose this entrenched omnipotence of the concept, practice and quasi-theology of growth. As Kenneth Boulding said: ‘anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad – or an economist’.⁵

Yet progressive and forward-thinking unions have strong campaign synergies with degrowth when they institute ‘just transition’ programmes for workers, move into developing arrangements for sharing work, prioritise improving the terms and conditions for part-time workers and have long-range plans for progressively shortening the average working week. Even as degrowth hits a brick wall with conventional structures and institutions, chapter 3 will show how many values and visions degrowth shares with various twenty-first-century movements such as ecofeminism, Occupy and municipalism, and with associated principles, such as autonomy, conviviality and frugal abundance.

Moreover, the rest of the book shows how degrowth action and theories have developed, cultural distinctions in degrowth’s evolution in various spaces, and political controversies at the heart of the movement. As an entrée, this chapter gives an introductory tour, starting from the French political and intellectual debates that founded degrowth through to its translation into other languages, including English, that duplicated misunderstandings and led to subtle reinterpretations. How has this missile word been used? What are its drivers and its limits? And, why do debates still abound over the relevance and appropriateness of degrowth?

BIRTH OF A PROVOCATIVE SLOGAN

Degrowth was coined as a mere notion, but with the clear intent of reversing growth, in 1972, when sociologist and journalist André Gorz contributed to a debate organised by the Club du Nouvel Observateur in Paris. Gorz asked a profound question with respect to the just published and later highly influential Meadows report The Limits to Growth.⁶ Was ‘global equilibrium’, he asked, ‘compatible with the survival of the (capitalist) system?’ given that Earth’s balance required ‘no-growth – or even degrowth – of material production’.⁷

Later in the 1970s, ‘degrowth’ was used several times, and mainly as a direct translation of ‘decline’, as in Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s work on natural degradation in The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971). So, in 1979, when Jacques Grinevald and Ivo Rens translated four of Georgescu-Roegen’s essays into English, they agreed to use ‘degrowth’ in translating the title Demain la Décroissance: Entropie – Écologie – Économie into Tomorrow Degrowth: Entropy – Ecology – Economy.⁸ Subsequently, in the 1980s and 1990s, ‘degrowth’ appeared from time to time at conferences and in publications but most of the time as a synonym for ‘decline’, such as in the monthly magazine S!lence in a 1993 special issue on Georgescu-Roegen that was edited by Grinevald. As such, the word was really only used occasionally. Although used with great precision and intent, the response was hardly fireworks. However, at the beginning of the 2000s, all of this changed.

An Adbuster activist group in Lyon who feared the greenwashing and re-appropriation of the concept of ‘sustainable development’ by the capitalist system read Georgescu-Roegen and realised that ‘décroissance’ might be a powerful semantic tool to radically question the limits of growth. That same year, in 2001, a group of intellectuals published on such themes in a special issue of the periodical L’Écologiste: Unmake Development, Remake the World!⁹ This was followed by a colloquium of the same name, from 28 February to 3 March 2002, at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris, organised by La Ligne d’Horizon.¹⁰ Consequently, these two groups got together to collaborate on a 2002 special issue of S!lence, a special issue that they called Décroissance Soutenable et Conviviale – Sustainable and Convivial Degrowth.¹¹

Even if their first understanding of ‘degrowth’ was in response to Georgescu-Roegen’s work and the need to decrease, to radically reduce, production and consumption, Adbuster activists Bruno Clémentin and Vincent Cheynet immediately saw in ‘décroissance soutenable’ (sustainable degrowth) an alternative slogan to ‘développement durable’ (sustainable development). Vincent Cheynet had been a marketing project manager with a keen eye for attention-grabbing slogans. Now the skills of promoting commodities for sale would be turned on their head in an effort which was anti-consumptionist and, indeed, more along the lines of decommodification. Meanwhile, members of the more academic and intellectual group were exploring the anthropological and cultural limits to growth, rapidly adding new dimensions to the emerging idea of degrowth.

The S!lence special issue included a contribution by degrowth pioneer Serge Latouche ‘A bas le développement durable! Vive la décroissance conviviale!’ (‘Down with sustainable development! Long live convivial degrowth!’). Here, very clearly, the degrowth attack on growth was explicitly undermining the reformist concept of light-green ‘development’ and highlighted its anti-systemic direction. Latouche wrote: ‘To survive or endure, it is urgent to organise décroissance … it is not enough to moderate current trends, we must squarely escape development and economism’. Degrowth became a political force: ‘Enacting décroissance means, in other words, to abandon the economic imaginary, that is the belief that more equals better.’¹²

In short, décroissance was a slogan born of radical anti-system critics who wanted to alert the world to the physical limits of growth and to question both the meaning of life and the imperialist dimensions of development. So much so that Gilbert Rist, author of The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith (1996), would write of ‘degrowth’ that ‘this neologism, was indeed an effective and genuine marketing coup which could have only be made by real professionals, even if we are all conscious about the ambiguity behind the term’.¹³

AN EFFECTIVE SEMANTIC TOOL?

A semantic tool enabling us to explode the concept and centrality of economic growth and question growth-associated addictions, ‘degrowth’ now became a tool for inviting in-depth debates on the unsustainability of infinite growth on a finite planet and to question whether growth was ever desirable. Even if criticising growth is not new, and its sabotage has been driven by others as well as degrowth advocates, ‘growth’ remains the dominant concept and simplistic, quasi-religious belief, in capitalist societies.

Growth is an omnipotent solution to all our problems – even, perversely, those problems that growth has caused – from unemployment to rising inequalities, from economic crises and public debt to environmental crises, energy scarcity and even starvation. Mainstream politicians, journalists, commentators and academics hail growth or its veritable namesake ‘development’ while the main goal of degrowth advocates is to attack the belief that more means better. In fact, Latouche has argued that we should speak about a-growth, in the same way as we speak about atheism, for it is a liberation from this belief of ‘always more’.

Similarly, the intent of ‘sustainable degrowth’ was, first, to highlight the intellectual deception of the oxymoron ‘sustainable development’; second, to avoid the risks of systemic re-appropriation; and third, to preserve the momentum of the rising awareness of, and discussion and debates around, environmental limits. Two decades later Cheynet’s and Clémentin’s concerns about the social power of greenwashing have been validated. Today everyone is encouraged to buy all kinds of familiar products mainly produced and distributed as they always have been but packaged anew with environmentally friendly advertising and narratives: sustainable, green, smart, good for ecosystems, ‘bio’, ‘organic’ and even ‘fair’, as in fair trade.

Using the term ‘degrowth’ protects against such dynamics. It is much more difficult to empty ‘degrowth’ of its clarity of meaning and its radical critique of the rationales imposed by capitalism, productivism and consumerism. Degrowth semantically challenges us to continually re-question all those drives and forces behind what we produce, how we produce things and for what uses. Using ‘degrowth’ protects advocates from linguistic distortion or co-option by capitalist forces and protects the movement from false and simplistic solutions to achieving environmental sustainability, such as green techno-fixes.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Degrowth has spawned, and attracted, a variety of complementary concepts less provocative but more connotative, indeed ‘federative’, in their association. A significant conference where the degrowth movement made presentations, informed and engaged with the European Union (EU) Parliament (in Brussels) in September 2018 was nominally a ‘post-growth’ conference.¹⁴ Given that the degrowth lexicon embraces terms such as conviviality, decolonisation, political ecology, socio-ecological economics, happy sobriety, voluntary simplicity, ecofeminism, municipalism, green new deal, transition, permaculture, prosperity without growth and autonomy, it brings the movements associated with them into a veritable convergence.

Degrowth is an invitation to go on the inevitably long journey of the decolonisation of our growth imaginaries, moving from cultural awareness to a systemic and material transformation changing our everyday practices. Degrowth insists on the deconstruction and re-evaluation of beliefs within, and relations between, capitalism and productivism, consumerism and materialism, development and the quasi-religion of economism, science and technology. In chapter 2 there is a discussion of the evolving matrix of complementary thoughts that have underscored the evolution of the idea of degrowth and follows how their integration with one another, that is, their ‘articulation’, ultimately questions the implicit and all-pervading belief in growth that dominates our contemporary reality. As such, the process of decolonising our imaginaries even challenges our concepts and daily practices around time, gender, death and democracy.

Beyond a set of thoughts deconstructing our dominant social and political structures, degrowth is an invitation to join a personal, collective, political, non-linear and heterogeneous journey that cannot be summarised in simple attractive slogans. Understanding degrowth requires time and iterative discussions to think deeply about the preconceptions, appearances and feelings that the word ‘growth’ creates. Degrowth calls for this intellectual, personal and collective effort. Sexy or not, federative or not, those in the Global North with reasonable incomes need to degrow to live within Earth’s environmentally sustainable limits. Simultaneously, there is a need to degrow inequalities within all societies. Inequitable ways of life are not sustainable, generalisable, or even desirable – as indicated in Figure 1.1. Like it or not, the movement challenges us all to imagine and move towards a degrowth future in responsible, democratic and emancipatory ways. As such, in chapter 3 we explore the spheres in which activists within the degrowth movement practice: as individuals, collaboratively in cooperatives and collectives, in resistance and furthering the degrowth project.

Figure 1.1 Two imaginaries

Cartoonist: Michael Leunig (Australia)

The key debate goes beyond whether we want to pursue degrowth. The main question revolves around how we implement what we perceive of as the inevitability of degrowth. The rise of carbon emissions and biodiversity loss are symptoms of unsustainable forms of production and associated unsustainable lifestyles. Climate change is just the tip of the iceberg of our current environmental crises. The cracks in the current system are growing wider, with uncontrollable natural disasters and oppressive economic woes. Just as we must cut carbon emissions, we must reduce overall consumption, and production.

In short, the key question is: will degrowth be democratically chosen and implemented in sustainable, fair and convivial ways or imposed as an unfair, undemocratic and violent decline, even collapse? It is legitimate to ask: isn’t the choice between degrowth or barbarism?¹⁵ How has the degrowth movement moved from a slogan to that ‘hard slog’ of putting degrowth into practice, to start processes of new ways of living and being? In chapter 4 we explore the political dimension of degrowth. How might the movement best articulate pragmatic strategies of ‘doing’, experimenting with and prefiguring a degrowth society, engaging with parliamentary representation, collaborating with the union movement and, crucially, initiating non-violent direct resistance in terms of rapacious capitalist growth? We find that internal organisation and external relations are two sides of the same, essentially political, coin. Deepening the analysis, chapter 4 discusses political philosophy and analyses strategy to pre-empt the debates on the degrowth agenda, the ‘degrowth project’, which is the focus of chapter 5.

AMBIGUOUS, LIMITED AND LOST IN TRANSLATION?

A provocative anti-systemic slogan, degrowth has attracted criticism, even loathing and disgust, specifically as a way forward. Isn’t degrowth just ‘going back to the caves’? Isn’t it a dangerous form of austerity? Why don’t we just demand better forms of growth?

Even if its influence within political, intellectual and cultural debates has been significant and keeps increasing, those involved are eager for the degrowth movement to become more visible. Certainly, in 2020, degrowth cannot be said to have inspired an exponentially growing mass movement. Nor has it ever been as prominent as the Occupy movement was when it started in 2011. Long-time European proponents are impatient and disappointed that the potential of the deep philosophy and radical direction of degrowth has not been realised. Why hasn’t the movement attracted more support? They have even wondered whether this indicates that degrowth is just a transitory tool, a simple demand or campaign, within a much broader transformation?

The key point is that, so far, degrowth has not been able to create, federate or comfortably federate within a large movement. But isn’t this the situation for almost all progressive and emancipatory movements this century, especially since 9/11, Occupy and the alter-globalisation movements? We address reasons for this seemingly unnecessary sense of malaise and, more significantly, make clear and radical proposals for ways forward in chapter 5. Meanwhile, degrowth is unlikely to disappear as a social force until the decolonisation of our economistic growth imaginary – and addictions to more, better and bigger – is achieved.

More worrying are charges that degrowth is ‘reactionary’, that the use of the Latin negation de before a quantitative, economic term is contradictory. And, does not the very word ‘degrowth’ create the risk of falling into a binary trap of endless debate for or against growth? Advocates argue that degrowth must encourage a movement of focus from quantitative to qualitative perspectives, and aims to enable more complex and subtle debates. That’s why a few still wonder if a-growth might be a more powerful and precise slogan.¹⁶ Because it was developed specifically to directly hit its target, growth, it is a paradox that degrowth is subject to so much misunderstanding. Of course, to degrow for degrowth’s sake would be as stupid as it is to grow simply for the sake of growth.

Often, we hear or read what seems to be a reasonable statement, such as: ‘I agree with the ideas and the principles behind degrowth but not the term.’ This objection was raised several times in the aforementioned EU Parliament Post-Growth Conference in 2018. It is a favourite statement made by politicians, economists and entrepreneurs who prefer to sweeten whatever they think is ‘poison’. Some conference participants responded to the effect that it might be good that degrowth was an uncomfortable word to their ears, even better a thorn in their sides! Many in the movement consider that disliking ‘degrowth’ as a word is a key indicator that the person making the objection has more substantial misgivings, would prefer to hide from or trivialise the radical meaning of degrowth, its depth and holism.

Still, it is tiring to have to explain what degrowth is not, through denial and defence, rather than concentrate on a constructive discussion about the real meaning of degrowth. A word less open to disagreement might be preferable but ‘a-growth’, for instance, has never taken hold. There is a fear that ‘a-growth’ might meet the same fate as ‘sustainable development’, that is, it would be appropriated or co-opted. Many related and unrelated political slogans have faced misinterpretation and distortion, most often due to false associations made with their practices and practitioners. As they say, ‘mud sticks’. ‘Simple living’ has been tainted by ‘hippies’, women’s liberation has been altered to ‘feminism’, and ‘socialism’ has been adopted to make a clear distinction from failed real-life examples of state ‘communism’. At the same time, there has been widespread resistance to such changes in nomenclature following the strategy of owning the name one is acrimoniously called, as in ‘Yes, we are Queer and we celebrate it!’¹⁷ In a somewhat similar way, for us in the movement, ‘degrowth’ sticks.

Décroissance spread from France to French-speaking regions like Belgium and Switzerland. First, it was translated into other Latin languages – in an intuitive way based on the logic of French, with the Latin negation ‘de’ followed by ‘croissance’, thus ‘decrescita’ in Italian and ‘decrecimiento’ in Spanish. By the time of the First International Degrowth Conference in Paris in 2008, it had been translated into English as ‘Degrowth’ but not without a prolonged debate. Indeed, the call for conference abstracts included both ‘De-growth’ and ‘Degrowth’ – which remained in simultaneous use until a consensus was found with the non-hyphenated and finally de-capitalised form.¹⁸

From the late 2000s, décroissance was translated into many other languages – as ‘nemnövekedés’ in Hungarian (2011–) and ‘odrast’ in South Slavic languages of former Yugoslavia (2013–). In Germany degrowth became Postwachstum, Postwachstumsgesellschaft or Postwachstumsökonomie given that ‘linguistically it is not possible in German to construct a neologism in parallel to “de-growth”’.¹⁹ However, this causes some confusion due to widespread English interpretations of ‘postgrowth’ as not necessarily anti-capitalist, let alone consistent with the principles of degrowth. What has made everything easier for English-speaking cultures is that other languages, such as Swedish, simply adopt or re-use the English word.

THE DEBATE IS STILL OPEN

This chapter set the rise of the degrowth movement in our global conjuncture, with global environmental crises and economic instability framing debates on the uncertain future of both our human species and the growth-driven capitalist system. We sketched the evolution of the ‘degrowth’ movement from a critical meeting between authentic Adbusters who wanted a foolproof name for their movement and intellectuals absorbed by scientific works focusing on physical and philosophical limits to growth. From a provocative slogan, degrowth has become a rich and multidimensional set of thoughts, theories and ideologies starting with the deconstruction of our growth imaginaries right through to the multi-faceted material challenges of emancipation.

There is no doubt that the term ‘degrowth’ has proved a useful platform for fruitful debate and experimentation. Yet it too has its limits and there is a general regret around the antipathy, dissonance and misunderstandings that the word ‘degrowth’ can evoke when people first encounter it, and even after some familiarity with the term. So, we have to ask: is such a provocation still a useful tool? Yes, for the last twenty years it has attracted rising interest and a growing movement and, most significantly, the word ‘degrowth’ has avoided co-option, proving both its pertinence and its utility.